She found a seat upon it and motioned to me to come
close, and I stood close, staring down on her while she stared down
at her feet, grey with dust almost as the road itself.
"We were children, Camillo and I," she said at length, "in keep of an
ill woman we called Maman Trebuchet, and in a house near the entrance
of a court leading off the Rue de la Madeleine and close beside the
Market. How we had come there we never inquired. . . . I suppose all
children take such things as they find them. The house was of five
storys, all let out in tenements, and we inhabited two rooms on the
fourth floor to the left as you went up the staircase. . . . Some of
the men quarrelled with their wives and beat them. There was always
a noise of quarrelling in the house: but outside, before the front
door, the men who were not beating their women would sit for hours
together and smoke and spit and tell one another stories against the
Church and against women. The pavement where they sat and the street
before it were strewn always with rotting odds and ends of
vegetables, for almost every one in that quarter earned his living by
the Market, and Maman Trebuchet among the rest.
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